Antarctic tourism: the pull of the pole

An Antarctic holiday involves spending weeks in the least hospitable place on
earth, having crossed one of its most vindictive seas. Chris Heath investigates
the irresistible attraction that draws tens of thousands of tourists a year.

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The Kapitan Khlebnikov, a Russian icebreaker, heads through pancake ice towards a tabular iceberg in the Weddell SeaPhoto: CHRIS HEATH

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Looking out from Brown Bluff on the Antarctic Peninsula.Photo: CHRIS HEATH

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"Like a chorus of children on stage stepping forward for their big number, the chicks started flapping their wings and dancing"Photo: CHRIS HEATH

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Meeting elephant seals in South GeorgiaPhoto: CHRIS HEATH

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A king penguin colony near Fortuna BayPhoto: CHRIS HEATH

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"It feels an impossible, absurd privilege to be here. And we are so alone"Photo: CHRIS HEATH

On January 17 1912, on the day he reached the South Pole just under 100 years ago, Captain Scott recorded his impressions in his diary. 'Great God,’ he wrote, 'this is an awful place.’ Few of the early Antarctic pioneers differed in their overall opinion. It was a place to be survived, if luck and providence were with you. They went for exploration, and sometimes for science too, and for the glory of achieving something that had never before been achieved. If they occasionally revelled in some of the wonders of the natural world around them, for most of the time their environment was something brutal to be endured. What little wildlife there was, principally the penguins and seals found around the coast, was of interest mostly as food and fuel.

Once the ultimate flag-planting Antarctic objective, reaching the South Pole, had been achieved, enthusiasm for visiting the continent quickly waned. Shackleton’s last-gasp expedition of 1914-17 may be one of the very grandest survival tales against improbable odds, but as a mission (he intended to become the first person to cross the landmass from one side to the other) it seemed quixotic and was, anyway, a complete failure – he and his men never even set foot on the Antarctic continent. After that, wiser heads saw little reason to go back, and for decades no one did.

The gradual return in the middle of the last century was driven partly by science and partly by a frantic competition between nations that saw Antarctica as the last great land-grab on earth. To this end, different countries employed different tactics. The less theatrically inclined established research bases. Others took a more aggressively symbolic approach – in 1938 German seaplanes flew over east Antarctica and dropped one swastika-engraved javelin every 18 miles. When the Antarctic Treaty was signed in 1961, none of these claims, however made, was actually repudiated or rejected; what the treaty agrees is that all territorial claims will be suspended, and no new ones made, while the treaty remains in force. Military activity on the continent was prohibited. The implication was clear – Antarctica was to be left to the scientists. For a time, it was. Then amateur enthusiasts for the unusual and the unknown – tourists – began to show an interest.

Because Antarctica is not an easy place to get to, to subsist within or to travel around, this inevitably presented a series of challenges – challenges that remain to this day. Some solutions have proved more successful than others. One early answer was simply to fly low over the continent itself, and show off some of its wonders from above. This method enjoyed some popularity until November 1979 when the crew of an Air New Zealand sightseeing flight were given incorrect coordinates. They crashed into Mount Erebus and all 257 people aboard died.

If not by air, by sea. From the start, most tourist travel to Antarctica has been by boat. Not only as a vehicle to get there, but also as a home to live on while you are there, because the only accommodation on the continent itself is at scientific bases, and these don’t accept passing visitors. (To this day, there is virtually no land-based Antarctic tourism. If you want to travel substantial distances inland, for which you must camp on the ice, you can do so only in a small team with bespoke, high-end, specialist operators.)

But even travelling to Antarctica by boat is not simple. You must cross the Antarctic circumpolar current, the wide stretch of water that separates Antarctica from the nearest southern continents, one of the most reliably rough seas in the world. Then you have to face the ice. Most tourist travel is limited to one relatively small area, the Antarctic Peninsula, which looks like a tail sticking up from the otherwise disc-shaped continent towards the bottom point of South America. Because of the peninsula’s higher latitude relative to the rest of the continent, it usually remains fairly ice-free for a few months in the southern summer and so can be reached in boats that, while adapted and strengthened for the perils of the Antarctic waters, are not actually icebreakers. The rest of the continent is surrounded by ice most of the year, and only in those summer months does it break up enough even for icebreakers to make their careful way towards the continent’s true edge.

The very first tourist party is said to have come in 1959. The first specially commissioned cruise ship for polar tourism arrived in 1969. Since then, more have come each year. In 2009 there were nearly 40,000 visitors. (This may sound a lot, and perhaps it is. But, to put this into some perspective, in the same year about 750,000 tourists visited the Maldives.)

Last November I became one of those tourists. While it’s possible to fly to Tierra del Fuego and get to and from the peninsula, with a few days’ exploration between, in just over a week, you need far longer to visit more distant parts of the continent. This trip was for a month, aboard a Russian icebreaker, heading deep into the Weddell Sea, the large, mostly frozen expanse that lies to the peninsula’s south-east. There is an involuntary, unscientific survey that anybody visiting Antarctica conducts beforehand when you tell people where you are going: the responses invariably cleave between 'I’m so, so jealous’ and 'Why on earth would you want to go there?’ And as much as I wanted to go, I was also aware that the second response did seem like a reasonable question.

I can certainly think of some good reasons not to go to Antarctica. For one, it is mind-bogglingly expensive. Early in my voyage, I walked past the ship’s small gift shop with two Colorado doctors, one just retired, the other nearly so, who had been given their wives’ blessing to indulge their Antarctic fantasy. As one of them peered at the souvenir clothing within, he commented, 'Wonder if there’s a "My husband spent $25,000 on a cruise to the Antarctic and all I got was this T-shirt" one?’

That’s for the very cheapest tickets – $25,000 is roughly the price for sharing a very small cabin with two other people. Nor does that involve travelling in the kind of luxury generally associated with spending that amount of money. The ship we are on, the Kapitan Khlebnikov, was built as a working icebreaker, and though every attempt has been made to make the accommodation as nice as possible, these are not plush, deluxe cruise-ship suites. (A three-bed room has two bunks and a sofa bed.)

Then there is the Drake Passage, which is the portion of the Antarctic circumpolar current that you cross between South America and the peninsula. As many have discovered through history, no amount of money or power can prevent the ocean from doing exactly what the ocean wants to do, and what it tends to want to do in the Drake Passage is to take ships passing through it and violently tip them up and down and from side to side. The Drake Tax, they call it; all must pay.

I later read a story about a recent catastrophic Mediterranean cruise during which things were smashed ship-wide because the ship tipped an unprecedented 11 degrees to one side. This is not the Mediterranean. Also, we are in an icebreaker –and some of the very design aspects that make it so well adapted for icebreaking also make it particularly prone to rolling and pitching in rough seas. (Its rounded hull, for instance, and also the absence of external stabilisers because, travelling through ice, these would be immediately ripped off.) The maximum roll we will record on this voyage is just over 30 degrees and we will spend several days constantly rolling at more than 11 degrees. You get used to it, sort of – unless you are one of those who don’t. When the seas get rough, paper vomit bags are tucked into the handrails that line each corridor and stairwell, and they are used. Some passengers disappear to their cabins when the tipping begins and return, a little thinner, a few days later. The rest of us learn to live with a kind of constant instability, and get used to the occasional but inevitable violent pummelling when we get it wrong and find ourselves accelerating into an immovable object. Aboard ship there are other odd adjustments: for those of us who still attend mealtimes (to eat, and share the latest mishaps; one passenger awakes to a crash and the discovery that he has just lost a cherished magnum of Argentine red), we find that the tablecloths have been dampened before each meal to deter the disappearance of plates and food and glasses off the table’s edge.

Another reason not to go, I suppose, is what you will see when you are there, which is also to say what you will not see. Judging by their brochures, Antarctic operators largely seem to be appealing to two interest groups – the history buffs and the nature lovers. The history buffs tend to be drawn to the golden age of Antarctic exploration – principally the two British totems to heroic failure: Scott, who reached the Pole but died on the way back, and Shackleton, who never reached the Pole but who, overcoming improbable hardships and peril, somehow brought back alive the entire crew of his 1917 expedition ship, the Endurance. The other side of Antarctica, around the Ross Sea, is where you can most convincingly feel yourself breathing the same cold air as Scott – most vividly by visiting the hut in which he and his men lived as they prepared for the push to the Pole, preserved by the cold more or less as his party left it, and still containing many of the provisions his men left behind. This side of the continent is more for the Shackleton­ites. The Weddell Sea is where his expedition went awry when the Endurance, after nimbly threading its way through small trails of open water and nearly reaching the continent’s coastline, was trapped in ice by changing winds and currents – ice that held the ship captive for 10 months before eventually crushing it. Shackleton and his men remained on the ice for a further four and a half months before enough open water appeared for him to usher them into their three salvaged lifeboats, and to embark on the next extraordinary leg of their survival journey. (Some of you may be wondering where the Amundsen tourists go. The Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was, after all, the man who actually reached the South Pole first, 35 days before Scott. But he reached his objective, and returned with such efficiency, and such a lack of drama and disaster, that he left few physical or emotionally resonant traces.)

One of the draws of this particular trip for the historically inclined is to, in some way, shadow the path of Shackleton. And for nature lovers, the specific lure is to see emperor penguins. (Emperors are those best known for being perhaps the only animal whose life cycle has been turned into a hit Hollywood film, March of the Penguins.) They gather and breed over the winter in sites on the edge of the mainland, places difficult to visit even in an icebreaker, and so opportunities to see them in large numbers are very rare. The places we are aiming to see have been visited by tourist groups no more than four or five times.

If these are the two particular hooks for this trip, there is also an extensive itinerary describing the many wonderful places we will visit along our way and the many wonderful experiences we will have. But this is what a prospective visitor to Antarctica should bear in mind: in the way that tourist trips to Antarctica are advertised, there is always a tension between, on one hand, the commercial imperative to preview all the specific sites that will be visited and things that will be seen, and, on the other hand, the nature of the Antarctic itself. Every honest Antarctic itinerary should also be clearly accompanied by the statement: We cannot guarantee that any of this itinerary will happen. And, to be frank, a great deal of this itinerary almost certainly won’t happen. The truth is that once you are in the Antarctic, if the wind, or the sea, or the ice says that you can’t do something, you cannot do it.

In my case, if I assessed my trip by ticking off what we actually did against the itinerary we were given before we left, or even against the hopeful daily itineraries that were tucked into a folder on the outside of our cabin doors each evening about the next day’s activities, then ours would turn out to be at the more disastrous end of the spectrum.

Here is one small example. One of the passengers, Mary, an investment banker from Australia, grew up with a woman called Polly who was her de facto grandmother. On Polly’s dining-room mantelpiece was a rock into which had been placed a small metal plate, on it the words elephant isle. The young Mary assumed it was from Africa but it actually came from Antarctica. After Shackleton’s lifeboats set off from the Weddell Sea ice, it was on Elephant Island, at a tiny, desolate, rocky bay hemmed in by cliffs and ice, that they managed to land. With still no hope of rescue from there, Shackleton and four others headed hundreds of miles north-east across the Drake Passage, managing to survive horrendous seas and successfully navigate their way to South Georgia, where they climbed across the previously unconquered icy and mountainous interior to find rescue. This rock came back with them, and was given to Polly’s father when he and Shackleton shared digs in Chile. Polly herself shook hands with Shackleton aboard his boat as he left England for the final time in 1921; before she died last year at nearly 96 (for her 95th birthday she had a flying lesson in a Cessna two-seater) she reckoned that she must have been the last person still alive to have shaken Shackleton’s hand. And she knew that Mary had booked this trip on the Kapitan Khlebnikov, and would be visiting Elephant Island, home of that rock on the mantelpiece.

Imagine, then, how it might feel, three days into the voyage, to have travelled across the world, and across the Drake Passage, and to see Elephant Island looming out of dark clouds, and to have pointed out for you in the murky distance the landing spot where Shackleton’s men clambered ashore and where we were supposed to go too, and to be told that with a swell this high and a wind this great, there was no possibility at all that we would be able to land in the Zodiac inflatables that offer our only way of leaving the ship in open water, and that we might as well head on to our next destination (where we would also be thwarted).

Still, it would be wrong to give the impression that Mary consequently spent most of her trip moping at the loss of these grand, symbolic, long-anticipated opportunities. The smarter Antarctic travellers know what they are getting into. Indeed, one of the lessons that being on board a ship reminds you of is that people basically remain whoever they already were, wherever they are. Mary – along with perhaps a majority who find themselves aboard a ship such as this – is from the grab-life-and-enjoy-it brigade. (As for Elephant Island, she says she will come back.) Likewise, there are a few others aboard of the kind who will always find disappointment wherever they are, even if there is none to be found – there is, it seems, a certain kind of inner discontent from which no environment can free you.

Perhaps you are beginning to wonder why people do go. But consider this. A journey here may seem to have all the attributes of A Trip of a Lifetime – certainly in terms of expense – but once people have been, they tend to return, again and again. About half of the 100 passengers on my trip had travelled here before, and many of these had paid multiple visits – some as many as 12. What puzzled me at first is that, while these people were uniformly clear that this was the highlight of their year and that they had spent much of the time since their last trip plotting how they could get back here, when you asked them exactly what the allure was, their replies were hesitant and ultimately unconvincing. They might say something about a particular encounter with a penguin, or about a peaceful and joyful place removed from man’s messes, but you could tell that they knew they weren’t really managing to explain it either to you or to themselves. At first this frustrated me, but then I came to wonder if their failure to articulate might not be an essential character of what they were failing to describe. Antarctic’s grand, addictive appeal is that it is a place beyond.

On my trip, in the three weeks before we emerged from the ice and reached South Georgia, we suffered endless weather-related disappointments and made only three successful landings – one at Brown Bluff on the Antarctic Peninsula (the only hours in the whole trip that our feet were on mainland Antarctica), and two at emperor penguin colonies on the Riiser-Larsen Ice Shelf near the bottom of the Weddell Sea. But the latter two are among the most memorable days of my life: the helicopter journey over icebergs frozen hard into fast ice near the continent’s edge; the sounds of the birds and their chicks; the acrid smell; the ice all around; their seemingly benign indifference to our presence; the spellbinding, glistening, sculptural icebergs that surrounded the second colony, one of which had an ice cave within it that was judged stable enough in these low temperatures for us to walk within; the moment late on the first day among the emperor penguins when the sun suddenly burst below the clouds low on the horizon at the same time as some icy flecks began falling from the sky, and the fuzzy brown chicks, which before then had mostly huddled with adults, all seemed to move forward at once, like a chorus of children on stage stepping past the adults for their big number, and began flapping their fluffy wings and chirping continuously, and – I hate sentimental anthropomorphism but there seems no other way – started dancing. It feels an impossible, absurd privilege to be here. And we are so alone. There is a German research station near one of the colonies, but back out into the Weddell Sea there is no one and nothing – one morning one of the staff mentions that the nearest ship is more than 750 miles away.

Then there were the chance animal encounters. There are few species of animal in Antarctica, and we saw three that are very rarely seen. One was a Ross seal, the rarest of the seals precisely because they tend to be found on thick sea ice where humans hardly ever venture. (Reading Shackleton’s diaries in my cabin, I discover that he also came across a Ross seal not far from where we had our encounter, though his reaction was somewhat less reverent. 'Very good eating,’ he noted.) The second is the appearance of some scarce Arnoux’s beaked whales surfacing in a pool as we neared the ice shelf. Of course the scarcity of these sightings had to be pointed out to us; the third was different.

There is an animal I have wanted to see all my life. When I read before the trip that it was theoretically possible to see one in these waters but extremely unlikely, I felt a little sad that more of my years were slipping away without it happening. Then, one morning, heading north in open water, I was on the bridge when there was a slight commotion among the expedition staff. A whale blow had been noted in the distance, and there was something about it that made the marine biologist request that the boat stop. For the next 20 or so minutes, we waited for new blows in the distance, moved towards them, then stopped again. At one point something – two things, maybe – surfaced in the middle distance and then dived. A blue whale – the largest animal on the planet – and its calf.

That could have been enough in itself, but a few minutes later the adult appeared alongside the port bow and swam along with the boat, right next to where I was standing, alternately surfacing and diving only a few feet down, its body shining up from just below the surface.

But in a way even an experience of that kind is too specific an example to explain what is to be found and so loved in Antarctica, for you could still mistakenly imagine that a trip here involves endless dreary days of poor weather and disappointment saved by the odd stellar moment. It’s not like that. What is amazing is not just the occasional highlight but the whole wonderful strange world that envelops you between the highlights.

If I had to try to narrow it down, I guess that for me it was the ice and the sky. Before I went, no one even mentioned the Antarctic sky to me, but I had never seen clouds like this – sometimes sculptural, streaky, lenticular blobs against improbable blues; sometimes high, gently arcing, wispy lines of crimson, lilac and saffron; sometimes every kind of cloud you have ever seen piled together in the same sky as though an over-enthusiastic child has cut out all the clouds in a book of cloud types and pasted them on to the same page. And, in the middle weeks of our journey, the daylight sky was always with us. (This took some getting used to. At the first emperor penguin colony, I panicked for a few minutes when, seeing the sun nearing the horizon, I became convinced that the staff had somehow messed up and that there was no way they could now get the rest of us back to the ship by helicopter before nightfall. It was -17C that day, and I fearfully imagined a night out here on the ice. But I was, of course, an idiot, still clinging uselessly to non-polar logic. At this latitude, if the staff’s goal was to get us back to the ship before nightfall, they still had several months in which to achieve this.)

For me, most of all, it was the ice. As majestically amassed in icebergs, certainly – I could stare at icebergs for a week: the small blue ones being eroded by waves when we landed at Brown Bluff; the magnificent tabular icebergs we would pass, some serene and still, some battered by rough seas that splashed 100ft-high spray up their faces. But it was the sea ice that entranced me above all else. Who ever imagined that ice forming on the surface of a cold sea could take so many forms, so many spangled, speckled, cracked, tessellated shapes? Or show such colours? You may think Antarctica is the last place you would come for colours; you may think that ice is always white, or translucent, with maybe, at most, a blue-ish tinge. Not here. There are colours, iridescent shades that seem to have been smuggled in between other more familiar colours in ways that the most comprehensive book of paint colours could never conceive, that seem to exist nowhere else but here. It’s as though below a certain latitude the rules of physics somehow subtly shift and allow whole new spectrums between white and blue, and between blue and green, and between white and grey, and then – in celebration of the sun’s unconsummated flirtation with the horizon – a gentle dazzle of pale oranges and honey pinks and crystal peaches and cold-sea mauves.

And then there is the way the sky and the ice meet. On a clear sunny day, the horizon is a crisp line that – the occasional iceberg aside – circles 360 degrees around you. But it is on the gloomier days that the interplay between them is most beautiful. On the very gloomiest, you strain to pick out the faintest trace of horizontal that separates grey-white sky from grey-white ice but, when it is a little brighter, the frozen sea and the sky seem to push against each other. Some­times, far in the distance, just above the horizon you see the dark blue-grey smudge that polar navigators know as a water sky, indicating open water far ahead – even today, on the Khlebnikov, they often use this to steer by. Then there is its converse, iceblink, when the ice below the sky reflects on the bottom of the clouds on the horizon to create a bright white line hovering amid the gloom.

Antarctic tourism continues to evolve. As with other destinations whose appeal is their pristine, other-worldly remoteness, challenges persist to ensure that those who travel here don’t compromise exactly what they have come here to treasure. Early next year the Kapitan Khlebnikov, the only icebreaker currently working in the Antarctic each southern summer, will take what appears to be its final Antarctic voyage – not, principally, for environmental reasons (though the heavy fuel it prefers is being outlawed here) but because its Russian owners now want its exclusive year-round use for commercial or military purposes in the northern hemisphere. But there remain other ways to travel here – ice-strengthened vessels, often also offering more onboard luxury, abound. For those without the time or the stomach for the Drake Passage it is now even possible to fly to an airstrip on King George Island just above the Antarctic Peninsula and join your ocean-tossed fellow passengers there for the less tippy part of the cruise.

By whatever means, I suspect that it will still be worth it. Once you have been there, you wonder why, for all its expense and drawbacks, many, many more people don’t go. And if I never did quite work out why people keep returning there, it may be because I have now joined the ranks of those who can’t quite find the words to explain just what it is, but who know that there’s always next time.

"Celebrating Scott" centenary voyage

If you’re inspired by Chris Heath’s expedition, arranged by The Ultimate Travel Company, why not join Robin Hanbury-Tenison, the explorer, and Graham Boynton, Telegraph group travel editor, on its "Celebrating Scott" centenary voyage, which is due to sail from Ushuaia on February 4 2012? Proceeds from this unique Antarctic adventure will be supporting the work of the Scott Polar Research Institute. From £6,335 per person including international flights.